Enjoy that snow in the Cascades while it’s here…

This isn’t really fair to do to everyone on a Monday morning, but a couple of bleak articles on global warming that ran over the weekend were too good not to point out.

First off is the Sunday NYT story by Andrew Revkin reporting on efforts by NASA higher-ups to control interviews and talks by James E. Hansen, dubbed a “climate expert” and longtime director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The Times reports that “officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review (Hansen’s) coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.”

NASA says no we didn’t. Dean Acosta, NASA deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, claimed in the NYT article: “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA. We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”

Some of those facts that certain folks reportedly would like to muzzle include Hansen’s discussion of “clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide” and the notion “that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the Earth ‘a different planet.’ ”

The Washington Post on Sunday also touched on NASA’s motion to mute, as well as rather dire predictions about our approach to a state of irreversible, irreparable harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The BBC today reports on a UK study further detailing the effects of a warmer world.

And if you do want to get out and enjoy that snow before climate change calamities overwhelm the world, move quickly — snow’s getting a little soggy (see snow reports for Stevens Pass and the Snoqualmie Summit).